V
Veronica97
Guest
I was baptized going on 17 years ago as an adult. I had been in RCIA 8 years previously, only to find out I couldn’t be baptized b/c my husband did not have an anullment from his first marriage. My husband eventually got an annulment and we were married in the Church. I had been back in RCIA for only a few months, but I convinced the pastor to baptize me privately in December instead of waiting to be baptized with the RCIA group at Easter. I arrogantly thought that since I had been in RCIA previously (though not all the way through) and had been attending Mass with my husband for 10 years that I knew everything there was to know about the Catholic Church…WRONG. Fast forward to three years ago: I had a reversion experience and went to Confession for the first time in 7 years, and I finally began to REALLY learn the Faith I had so badly neglected to learn. I resolved through study and prayer every doubt I had about what the Catholic Church teaches and resolved to live a good life. For the past three years I have been confessing everything from the 14 years after my baptism I can think of that was a sin, but I thought all my sins before that were forgiven at baptism. I have had some doubts off and on these past three years that my baptism was valid (because I didn’t accept everything the Church teaches and because I failed to learn my Faith properly), but I was told by my pastor that as long as there is water, the priest intends to do what the Church intends, and the priest speaks the words, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” the baptism is valid. But I have read in the past in the Baltimore Catechism that baptism forgives original sin and all actual sins one is sorry for, and that upset me b/c at the time I was baptized I was committing sins that I really had no intention of stopping. I’ve confessed those, and I’ve tried to put the Baltimore Catechism out of my mind and trust that all my sins were forgiven. But now I’m wondering if ANY of my sins were forgiven (except maybe one that I actually was sorry for and specifically thought of at the time I was baptized)–due to the fact that I really didn’t think much about my sins before I was baptized, because I was so poorly catechized, and because coming from a Protestant background, I had a hard time believing some things were sins b/c good Protestants I knew had done them. I didn’t completely accept the authority of the Church or the Pope either. I’m not even sure if when I said I believe in the holy Catholic church, if I was thinking CATHOLIC or just “universal”. I remember rejecting Satan and all his works, but in my mind at the time, it just meant that I wouldn’t worship Satan (not exactly, but it might as well have been). In other words I just didn’t “get” that I was to AMEND my life. In my mind, I thought I was already a good Christian. So now I’ve also read St. Thomas Aquinas who says “… no one having the will to sin can, at the same time, be cleansed from sin, which is the purpose of Baptism.” I’m wondering if I need to make a complete confession of 29 years of my pre-baptismal sins or just maybe some sins that I think I might not have been sorry for or whether I should just trust that baptism forgave all my sins. NOW I realize the purpose of RCIA is to PREPARE people so that they do not make the same mistakes I made. I feel my baptism was valid, in that I was forgiven of original sin and the Trinity came to reside in me; however, I just don’t know that all my sins were forgiven. I feel I need to go to Confession for something else, but now when I go, I don’t know what to do about my prebaptismal sins. My mind has been flooding with these sins, and I am grappling with what to confess. I certainly don’t want to make a bad confession. What should I do?